Global 1968: Cultural Revolutions in Europe and Latin America

By A. James McAdams

Global 1968 is a unique study of the similarities and differences in the 1968 cultural revolutions in Europe and Latin America.

The late 1960s was a time of revolutionary ferment throughout the world. Yet so much was in flux during these years that it is often difficult to make sense of the period. In this volume, distinguished historians, filmmakers, musicologists, literary scholars, and novelists address this challenge by exploring a specific issue—the extent to which the period that we associate with the year 1968 constituted a cultural revolution. They approach this topic by comparing the different manifestations of this transformational era in Europe and Latin America.

The contributors show in vivid detail how new social mores, innovative forms of artistic expression, and cultural, religious, and political resistance were debated and tested on both sides of the Atlantic. In some cases, the desire to confront traditional beliefs and conventions had been percolating under the surface for years. Yet they also find that the impulse to overturn the status quo was fueled by the interplay of a host of factors that converged at the end of the 1960s and accelerated the transition from one generation to the next. These factors included new thinking about education and work, dramatic changes in the self-presentation of the Roman Catholic Church, government repression in both the Soviet Bloc and Latin America, and universal disillusionment with the United States. The contributors demonstrate that the short- and long-term effects of the cultural revolution of 1968 varied from country to country, but the period’s defining legacy was a lasting shift in values, beliefs, lifestyles, and artistic sensibilities.

Contributors: A. James McAdams, Volker Schlöndorff, Massimo De Giuseppe, Eric Drott, Eric Zolov, William Collins Donahue, Valeria Manzano, Timothy W. Ryback, Vania Markarian, Belinda Davis, J. Patrice McSherry, Michael Seidman, Willem Melching, Jaime M. Pensado, Patrick Barr-Melej, Carmen-Helena Téllez, Alonso Cueto, and Ignacio Walker.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780268200558

Book preview

PREFACE

This book is the result of a unique international collaboration that began in early 2017. At that time, we decided to take advantage of the impending fiftieth anniversary of the revolutionary events of the year 1968 by bringing experts from around the world to the University of Notre Dame to explore a period that continues to stir the imagination of those who study the topic. Rather than wait to meet for the first time at a conference, we spent more than a year engaging in extended conversations with potential participants from Europe, Latin America, and the United States about how to make a distinctive contribution to the scholarship on this tumultuous time in world history. We discussed many questions: What did we mean by 1968? When did 1968 begin and end? What topics, cases, and periods should we include? Could one meaningfully speak of a shared 1968 experience from one country to the next? Or were there multiple 1968s?

These conversations paid off immensely, inspiring us to narrow our project’s scope in two ways. First, rather than concentrate on well-traveled approaches to 1968, such as those emphasizing politics and social movements, we decided to concentrate on the issue of cultural revolution. Because we defined the word culture in a generous way, this approach had the advantage of encouraging us to include often neglected fields in our planning, such as musicology, film, and photography. Second, we deliberately chose to decenter our approach from the conventional scholarly focus on events in the United States. Instead, we emphasized the experience of 1968 in two other world regions, Latin America and Europe.

Thanks to these early conversations, the participants in our project were already thinking about these themes when they began to write their papers. We circulated drafts of their papers well before the conference began. As a result, when we finally met as a group at Notre Dame on April 26–28, 2018, for our conference titled 1968 in Europe and Latin America, we had no need for paper presentations or other formalities. We were already prepared to discuss our different approaches to a common subject. By the end of our meeting, our collaboration had paid off. Each of us was prepared to write the chapters in this book in response to a question that came up in all of our conversations: Was 1968 a cultural revolution?

This volume would not have come to fruition without the generous support of many people in the Notre Dame community. The conference was organized by a committee of faculty fellows from the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the two institutional sponsors of the conference. Aside from the editors, the committee members were William C. Donahue, Jaime M. Pensado, and Carmen-Helena Téllez. The conference also benefited from the cooperation of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, the Snite Museum of Art, and the Hesburgh Libraries. Angela Fritz at Notre Dame Archives and our faculty colleague Susan Ohmer worked generously with a team of undergraduate students to create a permanent online exhibition about Notre Dame in 1968. Notre Dame faculty members served as panel chairs and commentators, including Michel Hockx, Peter Casarella, and María Rosa Olivera-Williams. Victoria Langland, Stephen Wrinn, and Ohmer made important contributions to the conference’s concluding panel. Above all, the staffs of the Nanovic Institute and the Kellogg Institute did the organizational work required to make this ambitious international event a success. Melanie Webb played a heroic role in arranging all aspects of our participants’visit to Notre Dame and the conference proceedings. She was assisted by many other staff members from the Nanovic and Kellogg Institutes, including Sharon Konopka, Jenn Lechtanski, Monica Caro, and Therese Hanlon. To all of these individuals, we express our deepest gratitude.

We also express our sincere thanks to everyone involved in producing this volume. Cathy Bruckbauer played an instrumental role in organizing all of the chapter submissions. Elaine Yanlin Chen collated the images and illustrations. We are especially grateful to Stephen Wrinn and Rachel Kindler at the University of Notre Dame Press for their enthusiastic support and expert guidance. Rachel worked far beyond the call of duty to help us address all of the technical and organizational issues involved in producing this volume.

We are honored to dedicate this volume to three individuals whose devotion to Notre Dame’s students and faculty members has made the Nanovic Institute for European Studies a special place for posing enduring questions about the European past, present, and future: Robert Nanovic, Elizabeth Nanovic, and Sharon Konopka.

A. J. M.

A. P. M.

ONE

Revolutionary 1968

Contending Approaches to an Elusive Concept

A. JAMES MCADAMS

Why should we study the revolutions of 1968 today? At first glance, the answer to this question seems self-evident. Looking back on the tumultuous events that transpired more than a half century ago, one can hardly avoid raising the topic of revolution. Over the extended period that we associate with this year—roughly the mid-1960s to the early 1970s—this was a time of intense confrontation between the new and the old. During these years, societies were engulfed by conflicts over every seemingly incontestable convention and practice. Students and workers protested against what they viewed as the unjust and corrupt institutions that held sway over their lives. Intellectuals and activists demanded that the ruling classes address systematic discrimination against marginalized social and political groups. Writers and filmmakers experimented with controversial themes and innovative forms of artistic expression. Remarkably, this explosive assault on the perspectives and practices that preceding generations had taken for granted was not limited to specific political systems, countries, or continents. It was a global phenomenon. In the words of Paul Berman, a student radical at Columbia University in 1968, the weird quality of 1968 was the way that, for the first time since 1848, things took place nearly simultaneously all over the world.¹

Because of this striking conjunction of events, scholars across a wide range of disciplines, from the social sciences to literature and the arts, have sought to capture the manifold dimensions of this period by speaking of the Long ’60s.² In fact, some observers contend that these years marked the transition to a new age. Historian Arthur Marwick concluded his landmark study The Sixties with the following pronouncement. These years, he remarked, were no transient time of ecstasy and excess, fit only for nostalgia or contempt. In Marwick’s judgment, there has been nothing like it. And, he added, Nothing [will] ever be quite the same again.³ Other scholars have come to similar conclusions. For a group of German and American historians writing in the late 1990s, these events were evidence of a world transformed.⁴ Even onlookers who view these developments negatively have not disputed their influence. For the political theorist Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., the late sixties were a comprehensive disaster, an epoch, it seems, that is best expunged from liberal democratic society like a powerful toxic waste.⁵ In a campaign speech on April 29, 2007, the center-right French politician Nicolas Sarkozy declared that the memory of 1968 should be liquidated for having imposed intellectual and moral relativism on his country.⁶ Two weeks later, Sarkozy was elected France’s president.

Nevertheless, however contemporary scholars assess the events of the 1960s, positively or negatively, they must all confront an unavoidable question. Given the vast body of scholarship that already exists on the topic, are there issues on which there remains significant room for disagreement? The most fruitful way of responding to this challenge is to treat it as three separate questions: Can a given event or activity legitimately be called revolutionary? Has the event had the transformative effect that we typically associate with revolutions? Was this event a manifestation of a unitary set of developments, that is, evidence of a universal 1968?

The first question requires us to set the parameters of the term revolution. In the tradition of social theorists from Max Weber to Émile Durkheim, a revolutionary act is necessarily destructive. Unlike most challenges to authority, its instigators seek to overturn entrenched institutions, roles, and ideas and replace them with new ways of thinking and acting. In line with this approach, revolutionary events have been, if not frequent, at least recurrent features of the modern era. All of the best-known cases between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the North American, French, and Bolshevik revolutions, took the form of full-scale assaults on the status quo. Their proponents reveled in the opportunity to overthrow long-standing aristocratic regimes, upend seemingly impregnable class and social structures, and introduce new conceptions of justice and human worth.

In 1848, Karl Marx captured the cataclysmic nature of revolutions in a vivid passage in the Communist Manifesto. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, he wrote, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.⁷ Writing 170 years later, the American sociologist Todd Gitlin made virtually the same observation about 1968. The sheer number, pace, volume, and intensity of the shocks, delivered worldwide to living room screens, he noted, made the world look and feel as though it was falling apart. It’s fair to say that if you weren’t destabilized, you weren’t paying attention.⁸

In this spirit, many of the first generation of scholars working on the upheavals of the 1960s focused their attention on the high-visibility events and themes involving political conflict and the exercise of political power.⁹ By itself, the year 1968 was a time of direct and often violent confrontation between governments and citizens. Students at the Sorbonne in Paris seized control of the university and the stock exchange and engaged in fierce street battles with the police. Millions of workers joined these protests, conducting both organized and wildcat strikes and occupying factories, and they eventually declared a general strike. In June, a less violent, but equally consequential, assault on established authority took place in a different part of the continent, Eastern Europe. Under much more difficult political conditions, sixty-one writers, artists, intellectuals, and scientists published a bold manifesto, Two Thousand Words to Workers, Farmers, Scientists, Artists, and Everyone, that effectively questioned the legitimacy of Communist Party rule. The manifesto’s signatories demanded rights and freedoms that extended significantly beyond the cautious political reforms then underway under Communist Party leader Alexander Dubček in Czechoslovakia.¹⁰

On the other side of the Atlantic, protests swept across Latin America throughout the summer months of 1968. Brazilian students, artists, and Roman Catholic clergy took to the streets, demanding an end to the restrictions and human rights violations of the military dictatorship. In Venezuela, the Movement for the Reform of the University campaigned for progressive forms of academic governance and for freedom of the press. In Argentina, an unlikely alliance of students, workers, and local business owners shut down a section of the country’s second largest city, Córdoba, in protest against the Onganía military dictatorship. Tragically, on the eve of the 1968 Olympic Games in October, the Mexican army and police forces violently responded to a massive antigovernment rally in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City, killing hundreds of university students and arresting thousands of others.

It is one thing to argue that these events bore revolutionary traits, but in addressing them it is more difficult to provide satisfactory answers to the second question about 1968. Did these instances of political and social defiance have a lasting effect on established institutions and ways of thinking? To answer this question, we need to begin by keeping these events in historical perspective. Arguably, the consequences of these challenges to the status quo pale in comparison with the revolutions in North America and France at the end of the eighteenth century and in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth. The grand revolutions of these eras precipitated decades of sustained violence and social disorientation. During these tumultuous periods, American and European revolutionaries went far beyond the overthrow of the rulers of the old regimes. They laid the groundwork for thoroughgoing changes in elite attitudes about the nature of the just society. At the same time, they emboldened their populations to think in new ways about the state’s responsibility to its citizens.

In contrast, the challenge of assessing the political influence of 1968 in Europe and the Americas is more elusive. For example, students occupied university administration buildings across the United States, attempting to use these institutions as platforms to call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam and to support the civil rights movement. However, their actions were short-lived and ineffective. University leaders often responded with punitive measures. Moreover, in these and many other cases of political protest, the activists inadvertently generated greater public support for the politicians and policymakers they opposed. What haunted America, Gitlin observed about the years that followed, was not the misty specter of revolution but the solidifying specter of reaction.¹¹

In Latin America, widespread protest and rebellion caught the world’s attention, but they failed to produce an opening of the political arena. In many countries, they had the opposite effect. They provided authoritarian leaders with the ammunition they needed to defend the status quo. In 1968, Mexico’s ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) was rocked by the strikes and protests of nearly every segment of the population, including workers, students, merchants, and peasants. Yet the regime successfully held on to power for another thirty-two years. Elsewhere in Latin America, the consequences were devastating. Across the continent, military juntas came to power, using the supposed threat from left-wing groups and communist sympathizers as a pretext for mass repression. Both actively and tacitly, the rulers of these dictatorships were complicit in the killing of tens of thousands of people. To be sure, democracy returned to these states in the 1980s and 1990s, but this transition took place under circumstances—gradual reform and negotiated transitions—that had little to do with the revolutionary spirit of the late 1960s. In many cases, the victory of democracy was only possible because the rising elites reached an understanding with their predecessors that they would not hold accountable those who were responsible for past crimes and abuses.

In the Soviet Bloc, the effect of independent political activity was even less evident. After the collapse of Dubček’s experiment with socialist reform following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, more than a decade passed before the possibility of systemic reform took hold in a single Eastern Bloc country, Poland. The prospect of more sweeping changes became conceivable only after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev endorsed the idea of socialist transformation in the second half of the 1980s. In the interim, a small number of Eastern European and Soviet dissidents demanded that their governments adhere to the human rights guarantees and legal protections that were formally included in their countries’ constitutions. With the exception of opposition elements in Poland, however, their influence on their governments was negligible. In this respect, when these regimes fell during the revolutions of 1989–91 and a new generation of postcommunist leaders actively committed themselves to democratic principles and the protection of basic freedoms, the dissidents’ protests were largely no more than antecedents to these changes, rather than their causes.¹²

In fact, if one uses the political behavior of the aging American and European ’68 generation of the 2010s and 2020s as a measure, one might reasonably conclude that there has been a regression in the era’s vociferously democratic ideals. More than fifty years on, segments of the same demographic stratum that once demanded that its leaders adhere to liberal democratic norms, respect diverse political views, and treat all people as equals cast their votes for neo-authoritarian populist parties in Western Europe, the formerly communist Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the United States. One does not need to look hard to find antidemocratic elected officials in nearly every advanced democracy. Interestingly, the repudiation of 1968 has become an explicit component of the platforms of many of these groups.¹³ Additionally, it is a striking indication of how much the political climate has changed since the late 1960s and 1970s that even some of the era’s most visible personalities have expressed doubt about their achievements. In an interview in 2003, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the charismatic symbol of the French student rebellion, conceded as much. The man once known as Dany le Rouge acknowledged that the period had become less relevant to current times. In the late ’60s, Cohn-Bendit observed, the world began to change, and we have a completely different world today. The legacy of 1968 is very difficult, because if you say, ‘Do you think you can do politics like you did in the ’60s?,’ I’d say no. If you say, ‘Do you think that ’68 had an influence on the world of today?,’ I’d say no, except that it changed the world so that we have another world today.¹⁴

In light of the ambiguous political influence of these developments, a second generation of scholars has gravitated toward a broader treatment of 1968 as a possible cultural revolution.¹⁵ The contributors to this volume take this approach. Admittedly, the term culture is notoriously difficult to pin down. In the foundational study of the subject, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn provided a definition of the term that covers an enormous range of subjects related to the human experience. Culture, they argue, consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups.¹⁶ Nonetheless, there is a major advantage to the concept’s breadth. The focus on cultural change allows us to look beyond the themes of political power and domination to explore potentially enduring shifts in values, beliefs, life styles, and artistic sensibilities. By taking this approach, we are also free to examine topics that are frequently neglected in studies of revolutionary change, such as in educational policy, musical composition, work and family life, sexuality, and religious practice. Moreover, this focus alerts us to the possibility that cultural change, when it occurs, may have a deeper and longer-lasting effect than political change. One can readily imagine cases where the fall of political institutions is not accompanied by a fundamental shift in values. Conversely, when people’s ways of viewing the world are transformed, their political perspectives will almost certainly be affected. Demands for institutional change may follow shortly thereafter.

The second advantage of the focus on culture is that it, too, provides opportunities for ongoing scholarly research. Arguably, the search for alternatives to the status quo in the 1960s was not a passing phenomenon. Its enthusiasts raised questions about the human experience that are as salient in the contemporary world as they were a half century ago. Importantly, there also remains ample room for disagreement about the influence of their activities. To appreciate these differences, let us consider three of the most prominent examples of cultural change in the era: the reinterpretation of religious practices, the reassessment of gender roles, and the rejection of established norms of social behavior.

One of the most profound changes in the Long ’60s was in the public profile of the Roman Catholic Church. Beginning with Vatican II (1962–65) and spreading quickly throughout the Catholic world, religious officials, parish clergy, and laypersons posed searching questions about the relationship between the institutional Church and its followers. In Latin America and Europe, liberation theologians, such as Hélder Câmara in Brazil, Gustavo Gutiérrez in Peru, and Jon Sabrino in Spain, championed radical ideas (e.g., the preferential option for the poor) and underscored the spiritual obligation of religious leaders to be responsive to the struggles of the downtrodden. The historical significance of the ensuing conflict between the traditional and radical wings of the Church over these theological innovations is incontestable.

Just the same, the influence of liberation theology remains open to debate. From one perspective, the verdict is sobering. For decades, critics regarded the failure of Church authorities on the European and American continents to condemn their countries’ military dictatorships in the 1970s as proof that the institutional Church was impervious to change. From a contemporary standpoint, however, one can come to a more sanguine judgment. The ideas of the leftist theologians of the 1960s have become an established feature of Catholic thinking about the Church’s role and mission throughout Latin America. The election of a sympathetic Argentine cardinal, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, to the papacy in 2013 lends substance to the argument that the revolutionary thinking of the 1960s has had an enduring importance.¹⁷

In the same way, the depiction of this period as a cultural revolution calls attention to changing perceptions of gender roles. Student movements in West Germany and the United States provided the context in which activists could address the practical implications of controversial perspectives in the works of writers such as Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir about gender equality, sexual discrimination, and the treatment of mothers. Ultimately, these were questions about the meaning of human identity and its openness to redefinition. Yet here, too, there is room for debate over the influence of these ideas. Observers looking for evidence of the long-term effects of this reassessment of traditional roles might find it in the proliferation of women’s organizations in later years and increased participation by women in politics and public life in the 2000s. Of all of the attempts to transform social structures, Jeremy Rabkin has provocatively argued, feminism alone has maintained the fires of sixties radicalism.¹⁸ In contrast, skeptics can argue that continuing wage inequality and the scarcity of women in corporate leadership positions is an indication of the uneven influence of an earlier generation’s ideals. Nonetheless, there do seem to have been significant changes in attitudes about gender relations. The efficacy of the global #MeToo movement of the late 2010s against sexual assault and harassment demonstrates that issues that appeared radical one half century ago have become an accepted feature of mainstream discourse.

Finally, the Long ’60s were marked by the unabashed desire to expose the arbitrary foundations of all forms of authority and, to borrow Marx’s words again, to overturn all fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions. In particular, activists extended the principle of freedom of thought and action beyond the realm of politics to the cultivation of alternative lifestyles, habits of speech and dress, and experimentation in literature, music, and the arts. From one perspective, this openness to countercultural attitudes and behavior has had an enduring effect on the sentiments and dispositions of later generations. To cite a mundane, but revealing, example, we would like to think that we no longer live in a world in which the proprietor of a restaurant would throw a young woman out of a window for wearing a miniskirt. When this event occurred in Zurich in 1967, it was a sign of the rigid conventions of the times that public officials agreed to condemn the owner only after university students staged angry demonstrations.¹⁹ Still, even if this particular event would be less likely today, the desirability of overturning established cultural norms remains less than straightforward. The French government’s ban on the wearing of face-covering veils in public places in the 2000s is an instructive example of the potentially paradoxical application of the principle of social tolerance. In the eyes of human rights activists, the clothing rule is necessary to combat the denial of basic freedoms to women. In contrast, many Muslims, including women, regard the ban as an act of religious intolerance.

Beyond the debates over how one defines and then assesses the importance of the events of 1968, one must also wrestle with a third question about the era: Were the revolutionary events of the 1960s a unitary phenomenon? On one level, this is a simple matter of periodization. Marwick defines the 1960s as roughly the years 1958 to 1974.²⁰ George Will suggests that the era extended from November 1963 (the assassination of JFK) until October 1973 (the Yom Kippur War and the global energy crisis).²¹ Yet, the more challenging task behind this question is to identify commonalities in the lived experiences of individuals who were active during these tumultuous times. One possibility is that the radical thinkers and countercultural activists in the Americas and Europe shared enough in common to allow one to speak of a 1968 experience, or even a universal 1968. Conversely, another possibility is that their differences were so significant from one continent, country, or locale to the next that one should speak instead of multiple 1968s. Depending on the issue, one can make convincing arguments to support each perspective.

On the one hand, one can make a strong case for the shared quality of these experiences by emphasizing the theme of generational conflict. From West Berlin to Berkeley, Paris, and Mexico City, a transnational cohort of young people declared itself at odds with the traditions of its parents and grandparents. In the spirit of the rallying cry of the protesting Parisian students in 1968, il est interdit d’interdire (it is forbidden to forbid), these new social actors asserted their right as freethinking persons to make autonomous decisions about their lives. The French novelist and cultural theorist André Malraux may have set the threshold too high when he attributed this rebellious spirit to a single factor: the death of God.²² But at least two of the causes of protest and cultural experimentation were the same across the continents. Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America had in common the first relatively affluent and educated generation to come out of the post–World War II era. Sharing both the rising expectations of a burgeoning middle class and adolescent anxieties about an uncertain future, students in rapidly expanding and overcrowded universities were presented—much like Marx’s proletariat in the factories of nineteenth-century England—with plentiful opportunities to exchange countercultural ideas and militant objectives that were distinctly at odds with their upbringings. When their universities’ leaders refused to give in to their demands and their governments responded with hostility and repression, they took their grievances into the streets.²³

In addition, spectacular advances in communications technology in the 1960s had an indisputable unifying effect. The revolution of 1968 was literally televised. In the comfort of their living rooms, middle-class viewers took part vicariously in the latest developments in the space race, reveled in musical performances by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and developed personal impressions of the most prominent figures of the age, among them Charles de Gaulle, Pope Paul VI, and Che Guevara. At the same time, they were front-row witnesses to the brutal suppression of street demonstrations in Berlin, Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and especially Mexico City. They were horrified by the loss of life on all sides in the Vietnam War. The broadcast of Eddie Adams’s photograph of the execution of a Vietcong prisoner by Saigon’s police chief was truly a shot heard round the world.²⁴

On the other hand, one can make an equally strong case that the spirit of 1968 was not a unitary experience. From one country to the next, the challenge to the status quo took significantly different forms. In Western Europe, generational conflict took place in the context of agonizing debates about the character of postwar liberal democracy, which by this point had taken hold in every country on the continent, with the exception of the three countries still under dictatorial rule (Greece, Portugal, and Spain). In West Germany in particular, students condemned their parents’ failure to live up to the duty to address the barbarous crimes of National Socialism. In their eyes, their leaders’ inaction proved that German democracy was a sham. For many young militants, only a defiant long march through the institutions, the activist Rudi Dutschke’s cryptic reference to Mao Zedong’s armed struggle for survival in the 1930s, would suffice to force the German people to come to terms with their sordid past. In the 1970s, some of these radicals expressed their indignation through senseless acts of violence and terrorism.²⁵

In Eastern Europe, dissent took a very different form. Because of the sobering lessons of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, would-be challengers to the socialist establishment, such as Václav Havel, the playwright and future president of postcommunist Czechoslovakia, pragmatically chose to voice their discontent in unconventional and less explicitly provocative ways. They used theatrical performances to spread antiestablishment ideas, played in nonconformist rock and roll bands, and fostered a subtly subversive film culture. Likewise, dissident groups throughout the Soviet Bloc engaged in their own creative efforts to live within the truth (Havel) by engaging in similarly unorthodox forms of protest and artistic ingenuity.²⁶ By the end of the 1980s, these contrarian ideas had become so ingrained in popular culture that they were vividly represented in the protests surrounding the fall of East European communism.

In Latin America, the expression of discontent took different forms than in both parts of Europe. In particular, the continent’s traditions of protest had much deeper historical roots, reaching back to the era of colonial exploitation, the existence of unjust economic institutions, such as the hacienda system, the experience of decades of dictatorial rule, and repeated U.S. military interventions. As a result, more than in Europe, critics focused their demands for change directly on issues of class, race, poverty, and imperialism. In creative ways, novelists such as Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), and Carlos Fuentes (Mexico) called their readers’ attention to the profound inequalities and ingrained injustices of their societies and warned about the creeping hand of authoritarianism. They and other writers attacked their governments for courting U.S. corporate and military interests; some looked to the Cuban Revolution for fresh ideas about social equality and community engagement, and to the Non-Aligned Movement.

Despite the differences among these cases, it would be a mistake to assume that these manifestations of nonconformist behavior and social dissent were necessarily isolated events. In the twenty-first century, an impressive body of scholarship has emerged that focuses on the events of the 1960s from the perspective of global history. Eric Zolov, a scholar of Latin American history, has provided a succinct description of this approach. The study of the global 1960s, he writes, reflects a new conceptual approach to understanding local change within a transnational framework, one constituted by multiple crosscurrents of geopolitical, ideological, cultural, and economic forces. Such forces produced a ‘simultaneity,’ of ‘like’ responses across disparate geographical contexts, suggesting interlocking causes.²⁷

This global historical approach has many advantages. Unlike earlier scholarly approaches, it encourages us to step outside the conventional frames of reference of Cold War studies and neoliberal economics and consider forms of behavior, such as the activities of nonstate actors and local communities. It also calls our attention to the international networks that brought together the lives of discontented individuals on multiple continents. During the Long ’60s, idealistic Latin American students in universities in Europe and the United States experimented with remarkably similar types of living arrangements and musical and fashion styles. Much like scholars attending international conferences abroad, many of these young radicals traveled to other countries to meet their peers. In the process, they acquired organizational skills that they brought back home. Similarly, international organizations, such as the Non-Aligned Movement and the Catholic Church, provided transcontinental forums for politicians, activist priests, and intellectuals to exchange perspectives on contending ideologies and strategies for effecting social change. In these fecund times, the most fruitful interactions were frequently the result of the initiatives of single persons. In Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, an innovative gallerist, Leonel Estrada, generated electric debates over the latest trends in conceptual art, abstractionism, and pop art by exhibiting the works of contemporary artists from all over Latin America, among them Sarah Grilo, Santiago Cárdenas, Bernardo Salcedo, and Fernando Szyszlo. In 1970, he expanded these international exchanges to include European artists.²⁸

In addition, the focus on the global ’60s encourages scholars to study the indirect ways in which new ideas and attitudes transected the continents. Historian Victoria Langland has coined the term aspirational connections to capture the extent to which students, artists, and intellectuals in one part of the world were inspired simply by learning about the contemporaneous activities of radicals in countries they had never visited. Under different circumstances and without having the specific ideologies, approaches, or techniques, they sought to apply the example of their peers’ fortitude and creativity to their own movements.²⁹ In this spirit, they shared a mutual, if tacitly felt, sense of mission. They had both the opportunity and the obligation to contribute to the betterment of humanity.

In these respects, the idea of a global 1968 has many advantages. Nonetheless, whenever one broadens the scope of a topic, one must also be careful not to burden it with more weight than it can bear. It is indisputable that the second half of the 1960s was a disruptive and tumultuous time for countries and peoples around the world. However, this does not mean that one can use a concept such as the global ’60s to account for all of these events effectively. To take an illustrative example, the title Mao Zedong gave to China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) contained all of the words one could find in a typical student demonstration in Berlin or Mexico City in 1968. Nevertheless, although many youthful protesters found the colorful language and images of the GPCR attractive, this does not mean that Mao’s objectives in launching a wave of recrimination and violence against millions of his fellow citizens over these years will yield particularly fruitful comparisons. Indeed, if not undertaken with sufficient care, such broad-brush comparisons can lead to highly misleading conclusions.

For the same reason, conceptual stretching can inadvertently make comparative scholarship more difficult. For example, in an important work, one expert suggests that 1968 in the global imagination was about many different things. The most one may generalize is that it was not primarily about revolution, or class struggle, or even feminism. It was about autonomy, very often personal and individual rather than collective.³⁰ As sensible as this claim may seem at first glance, however, the substitution of a nearly all-encompassing concept such as autonomy for a narrower concept such as revolution may lead to less useful generalizations than one desires.

1968 IN LATIN AMERICA AND EUROPE

This volume seeks to make a fresh contribution to our understanding of the Long ’60s by bringing the revolution back in. It aims to accomplish this by approaching the topic of cultural revolution in two distinctive ways. First, the contributors focus primarily on the experience of 1968 on two continents, Europe and Latin America, in contrast to most studies of the period that use the United States as their principal point of reference. Of course, no one will deny the importance of the revolutionary events of the era in Berkeley, New York, and other U.S. cities and their substantial influence on world politics, social relations, and cultural attitudes. One could legitimately argue that the events of 1968 would not have had the same transnational significance without the hegemonic influence of these ideas and events. Still, the shortcoming of studies that concentrate on the United States and, in some cases, a limited number of Western European countries—primarily France, Britain, and Germany—is that they make it more difficult to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the period.³¹ For example, one of the consequences of this approach has been the relative neglect of themes that do not relate directly to U.S.-centric topics such as superpower tensions, the civil rights movement, and the war in Vietnam. The neglected topics include the transnational influence of the Catholic Church, the Non-Aligned Movement, the allure of guerrilla warfare, and class conflict. Moreover, the emphasis on the U.S. experience undoubtedly accounts for the comparatively few studies of the experience of the Long ’60s in the former Soviet Bloc, southern Europe, and Latin America. In these respects, this volume seeks to be a needed corrective.

Second, this volume is deliberately interdisciplinary. In contrast to the many books about the Long ’60s that emphasize political and social change, our contributors give greater standing to often neglected disciplinary approaches to this dynamic era. These include revolutionary developments in photography, musicology, film, and literature.³² We also include understudied subjects, such as educational reform and the refusal to work. Making this interdisciplinary approach even richer, we begin and end with the personal reflections of two individuals whose lives were shaped by the events of 1968. One, film director Volker Schlöndorff, was directly involved in the revolutionary events of the period. The other, politician and social scientist Ignacio Walker, is a representative of the generation that inherited the memory of this time and the opportunity to act on its lessons.

The reader will discover that this volume’s contributors do not always agree about how to assess the topic of cultural revolution in the 1960s. In many cases, they have opposing views, both subtle and significant, about the issues I have raised here: the proper definition of a revolutionary event, the challenge of assessing its influence, and the meaning of 1968 in its respective domestic and international contexts. To return to the question with which I began this chapter—Why should we study the revolutions of 1968 today?—these differences are welcome news. They mean that for years to come, we will still find many good reasons for continuing to wrestle with the remarkable events and ideas of the Long ’60s.

NOTES

I am grateful to Patrice McSherry, Michael Seidman, Carmen-Helena Téllez, Anthony Monta, Monica Caro, and Eric Zolov for their helpful comments on this chapter.

1. Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), cited in Independent, April 23, 2008.

2. For example, Christopher B. Strain, The Long Sixties: America, 1955–1973 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

3. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (London: Bloomsbury Reader, 1998), 730.

4. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, 1968: The World Transformed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

5. Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., The Legacy of the Late Sixties, in Reassessing the Sixties, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 21, 45. Mansfield’s chapter focuses on the United States, but this also seems to be his judgment about these events in the rest of the world.

6. The Telegraph, April 29, 2008.

7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 476.

8. Todd Gitlin, 1968: Year of Counter-Revolution, New York Review of Books, May 8, 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/05/08/1968-year-of-counter-revolution/.

9. For example, Samuel Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), chap. 7; Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Ronald Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988); Robert V. Daniels, Year of the Heroic Guerrilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968 (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

10. See A. James McAdams, Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 393.

11. Gitlin, 1968: Year of Counter-Revolution.

12. I address the causes in McAdams, Vanguard of the Revolution, chap. 22.

13. On this theme, see Thomas Wagner, Die Angstmacher: 1968 und die Neuen Rechten (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2017).

14. Caleb Daniloff, ‘Dany the Red’ on Student Revolutions, Then and Now: 1968 European Agitator Speaks at SMG Tonight, BU Today, March 18, 2008, http://www.bu.edu/today/2008/%E2%80%9Cdany-the-red%E2%80%9D-on-student-revolutions-then-and-now/.

15. Marwick, The Sixties, 3–19.

16. A. L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, 1952), 181.

17. For evidence that this struggle over the Catholic Church’s identity in the 1960s has extended into the twenty-first century, compare Ross Douthat, To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), with James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

18. Jeremy Rabkin, Feminism: Where the Spirit of the Sixties Lives on, in Macedo, ed., Reassessing the Sixties, 47. Notwithstanding this seemingly positive assertion about the feminist movement, Rabkin’s overall assessment is decidedly negative. Feminism finally seems to have carried on for too long for the awe and respect it received for decades. It still faces no solemn patriarchs in its path, he declares, but it is having difficulty responding to the mirthful mockery of [its critics] (74).

19. Ironically, this event took place at the Café Odeon in Zurich, the countercultural haunt of such iconoclastic figures as James Joyce, Lenin, and various Dadaist artists; see David Eugster and Lena Rentsch, When Zurich’s New Left Rode the Pop Culture Revolution, swissinfo.ch, April 16, 2018, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/social-upheavals_when-the-new-left-tried-to-ride-the-miniskirt-revolution/44017600.

20. Marwick, The Sixties, 7.

21. George Will, Foreword, in Macedo, ed., Reassessing the Sixties, 4.

22. Cited in Peter Steinfels, Paris 1968: The Revolution That Never Was, New York Times, May 11, 2008.

23. Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 19–20.

24. On the effect of such iconic images, see Willem Melching’s analysis in chapter 13 of this volume.

25. On this topic, see Volker Schlöndorff’s reflections about the influence of 1968 in chapter 2.

26. On the challenge of living within the truth, see Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, in The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), 23–96.

27. Eric Zolov, Latin America in the Global Sixties, The Americas 70, no. 3 (2014): 354. Among the many important works that are representative of this historiography, see Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die erste globale Rebellion, in 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zäsur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000), 19; Jeremy Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Jian Chen et al., eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building (New York: Routledge, 2018).

28. Alexa Halaby, The 1968, 1970, and 1972 Coltejer Art Biennials: Six Years of Cultural Revolution in Medellín, Colombia, https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/map/the-1968-1970-and-1972-coltejer-art-biennials-six-years-of-cultural-revolution-in-medellin-colombia.

29. Victoria Langland, Transnational Connections of the Global Sixties as seen by an Historian of Brazil, in Jian et al., eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, 20.

30. Odd Arne Westad, Preface: Was There a ‘Global 1968?,’ in Jian et al., eds. The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, xxii.

31. For example, Marwick only considers four countries in his massive 800-page volume: France, the United States, Great Britain, and Italy. He has nothing to say about the Southern Hemisphere or the communist world. Only one chapter of 1968: The World Transformed addresses the countries of the global South; this short chapter, The Third World by the eminent China scholar Arif Dirlik, is devoted to multiple, manifestly different cases, including the People’s Republic of China, India, Turkey, and Mexico. See 1968, 295–317. The Routledge Handbook is an exception. Its contributors cover literally every region in the world. A potential—though not inevitable—pitfall of this all-inclusive approach is that although anything can be compared, not all comparisons are equally useful.

32. A similar, interdisciplinary approach is taken by the contributors in Daniel J. Sherman, Ruud van Dijk, Jasmine Alinder, and A. Aneesh, eds., The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Berman, Paul. A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Cueto, Alonso. The Blue Hour. London: Random House, 2014.

Daniels, Robert V. Year of the Heroic Guerrilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968. New York: Basic Books, 1989.

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De Giuseppe, Massimo. L’altra America: I cattolici italiani e l’America latina. Da Medellín a Francesco. Brescia: Morcelliana, 2017.

Donahue, William C. Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s Nazi Novels and Their Films. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010.

Drott, Eric. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Fink, Carole, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker. 1968: The World Transformed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Fraser, Ronald. 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt. London: Chatto and Windus, 1988.

Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World Is Watching. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Huntington, Samuel. American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Jian, Chen, Martin Klimke, Masha Kirasirova, Mary Nolan, Marilyn Young, and Joanna Waley-Cohen, eds. The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Kurlansky, Mark. 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. New York: Random House, 2005.

McAdams, A. James. Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.

McSherry, J. Patrice. Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music, 1960s–1973. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015.

Macedo, Stephan, ed. Reassessing the Sixties. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Manzano, Valeria. The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Markarian, Vania. Uruguay, 1968: Student Activism from Global Counterculture to Molotov Cocktails. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.

Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974. London: Bloomsbury Reader, 1998.

Melching, Willem. Main Trends in Cultural History: Ten Essays. Vienna: Met Wyger, 1994.

Pensado, Jaime, and Enrique C. Ochoa, eds. México Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression during the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018.

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Seidman, Michael. The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004.

Sherman, Daniel J., Ruud van Dijk, Jasmine Alinder, and A. Aneesh, eds. The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

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Walker, Ignacio. Chile and Latin America in a Globalized World. Singapore: ISEAS, 2006.

Zolov, Eric. The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Performance

Carmen-Helena Téllez, performance of Arvo Pärt’s Which Was the Son of . . . with the Indiana University Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGOPckF3iS8.

PART ONE

Foundations

TWO

The Slow but Long Coming of

a Cultural Revolution

VOLKER SCHLÖNDORFF

The events of the year 1968 shaped my life and my view of the world to a degree I could not foresee at the time. During the Prague Spring I was shooting a film in Czechoslovakia’s capital,¹ a story set in the sixteenth century. What was happening around us, and the echo from simultaneous uprisings in Berlin (the shooting of Rudi Dutschke) and Paris (Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s activities at the Sorbonne), was so overwhelming that I introduced newsreel footage of these events into Kleist’s novella. Later I followed up with films about similarly tumultuous times: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), Knife in the Head (1978), and Leaden Times (1981) (Marianne and Julianne, being the U.S. distributor’s title), all of which I produced.

Please allow me to set all modesty aside and let me take my own biography as a case study leading up not only to ’68 but to the violent period of the Baader–Meinhof gang and the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorists, with which I was accused at the time of being a sympathizer, if not, as Heinrich Böll, the spiritual father of the violence—all ending in 1979 with a number of murders, among them Hanns Martin Schleyer’s (the head of the German Entrepreneurs’ Association), and the multiple suicides of some of the protagonists, as depicted in our collective movie Germany in Autumn (1978).

There was no doubt in our minds that we were living in revolutionary times, even though we did not follow enough the American protests, which were less theoretical and more focused on specific social realities, such as racism and the war in Vietnam. Today I would say ours was more a cultural than a political or social revolution. By culture I mean above all our way of life, our way of communicating and relating to each other, within our generation and toward the generation of our parents. Fundamental changes occurred in the way people thought about the past, present, and future.

Today what I find most remarkable is the almost simultaneous explosion of 1968 all over the world, a truly global event, even though at the time of its happening most people were not aware of this simultaneity. It must have been caused by quite different forces in all these different countries, from France to Chile, from Prague to Berkeley, from Berlin to Turin. I can only speak of Germany—and myself as one of the participants, not causes, of course. For me ’68, defined as an antiauthoritarian movement, started right at the end of World War II with the collapse of the old German middle class. It was fueled by the 1950s, the Adenauer years in the Federal Republic, and finally by the influence of my French education in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Paris.

THE END OF THE GROWN-UPS’ WORLD

My father came from Oldenburg in the north of Germany and was born a few years before 1900, just like his siblings and most of his friends, as a subject of the kaiser, Emperor Wilhelm II. Even their external appearance made that generation look as if they came from another world. In the late 1940s and the 1950s our father, a medical doctor, always wore a threepiece suit with a waistcoat, white shirt, and tie, sometimes an overcoat and certainly a hat, and he also carried a stick that he vigorously employed when taking a walk. Known as the Doctor and addressed by all with the respectful Herr Doktor, he transferred this honor automatically to me and my brothers, who were known as the Doctor’s kids.

Somehow, in the last days of World War II we must have sensed that the grown-ups were abdicating, and that soon the children’s hour would strike. A couple of weeks after my sixth birthday, white bed sheets were hurriedly hung out the windows. My older brother, Georg, was allowed to climb up the still leafless beech tree to raise the sign of capitulation from a high branch. As a precaution, the house was blocked up and abandoned. When we finally got the word, They’re coming!, we hid in the forest.

The Americans moved in on the bumpy path through the forest into our small location, by its suffix Bad a spa, but in fact rather a village. They sat on Jeeps, heavy trucks, and tanks. A burnt-out Wehrmacht vehicle blocked the road in the curve at the entrance to Schlangenbad.

The GIs were setting off explosions to clear the way, and in doing so they also blew up the old entertainment hall. It was a little casino in which Russian aristocrats, supposedly even Dostoyevsky, used to gamble away their money and the souls of their serfs. The ivory chips were left for us to play with in the ruins; the roulette wheel had been broken.

What impressed us children were the drivers of the U.S. Army trucks. They were Black, though they looked much different from the picture of the little Moor in our children books. Tall, and equipped with fearsomely white teeth, they seemed to us like supermen. Only men this big and strong could drive such monster trucks, we thought. Decades later I learned from Arthur Miller, while working with him in New York on Death of a Salesman, that the U.S. Army was only integrated beginning with the Korean War. Under Eisenhower in World War II, white and Black troops were still strictly segregated. Maybe they made friends with us, the children of the defeated, more quickly because of their underprivileged position. It didn’t take long for each of us to take on his own Yankee from among the very young GIs from Indiana, the Dakotas, and Nebraska. Since these young men had beaten our parents, they were our natural allies.

Authority was no longer a privilege of the elders. A true clash of civilizations ensued from this reversed order. We liked the style of these GIs; they didn’t act like victors, and they were so different from the bitter, tattered figures of the last German soldiers whose retreat we had witnessed during the last days, still hoping for a final victory. Chewing gum, Coca-Cola, Hershey bars, and Butterfingers were the convincing Wunderwaffen² of these young soldiers. We were interested in their guns and vehicles; they were interested in our bicycles and sisters. The first words we learned to ignore were off limits and no fraternization. We simply defected to the enemy, who cruised around the lawns and flower beds with one leg dangling out of their Jeeps, ignoring all the keep off the grass signs—which so far had stopped even German revolutions.

For us, new times began; the adults, however, lived in great fear of the occupiers. All kinds of Nazi publications, knives and daggers, countless editions of Mein Kampf, soup bowls with swastikas stamped underneath, large flags and small, even sports badges and canoe club membership cards were buried in the forest by night.

The world of the youth and that of the adults would drift apart in the next years. I was six and wore Lederhosen. In amazement, we discovered the new world. One day at the height of summer, word of the first atom bomb went around. A Jeep drove through the upper main street, honking wildly, and we children ran yelling alongside. The war is over, the war is over, we chanted, to the rhythm of The witch is dead, the witch is dead.

DISCOVERING MY OWN WORLD

Way into my teens my artistic education was shaped by illustrated magazines in the waiting room of my father’s surgery. Although culture was prized by society, in daily life it was limited to the request hour on the radio and a few quotations from Faust. For my father there were only two categories of art—pleasant and unpleasant. Since in life he experienced enough of the latter, art had to provide him with the former. He tried to undermine my first film, Young Törless (1966), based on Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless, resorting to intrigue, and he held that The Tin Drum (1979) was, in a word, dreadful! Coming from the world of the kaiser, having rejected the Weimar Republic, it was as hard for him to accept the new, postwar society as it had been to accept the Weimar Republic.

I first rebelled against his world by sneaking off after school to the Roxy, the Rio, the Apollo, or the Valhalla—the biggest cinemas in the nearby town of Wiesbaden—to watch American Westerns and gangster movies, which we did not yet call film noir. They appealed to me and my friends because they were shunned as filth and trash, the opposite of the bourgeois high culture of concerts and opera. Besides, these movies